


the prison of my person, the shackles of my skin

by everybodyknowseverybodydies



Category: The Last Unicorn - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 01:29:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4121284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everybodyknowseverybodydies/pseuds/everybodyknowseverybodydies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The nights she lay awake, which were frequent toward the beginning of the winter in the castle, she spent trying to learn this new, strange body, and as she did she held onto as much memory as she could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the prison of my person, the shackles of my skin

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the princess's song from _The Last Unicorn_.

The nights she lay awake, which were frequent toward the beginning of the winter in the castle, she spent trying to learn this new, strange body, and as she did she held onto as much memory as she could.

Fine white hair spread in cirrus strands across a pillow and shoulders that belonged to the Lady Amalthea, but not to her. She closed her eyes.

_Hands._

Molly scrubbed the floors every morning as she passed down the stairs, and each morning her small rough hands were already drowning in suds as she worked. She would look up with hair sliding into her face and the cat winding around her soap bucket. “Good morning, milady,” she would smile with bright eyes. Usually she answered her in the same way, when she was herself and could remember Molly’s tears. Sometimes it was the Lady Amalthea who stepped lightly around both woman and cat, and she remembered nothing, and said nothing to the scullery maid.

_Wrists._

Schmendrick juggled for the king, and performed his silly sleight of hand with a flick of the wrist and a clever trick with his fingers and his sleeve. But sometimes his bones cracked if he did it too quickly, and that gave him away. It was no matter; the king seemed to find his incompetence amusing. She caught sight of him once, in the scullery, huddled on a stool and muttering something as Molly pushed a bowl of soup to him before going around to put a hand on his shoulder. Then the Lady Amalthea entered, and they jumped away from each other.

_Arms._

When they were still far from Haggard’s castle, they had made camp and lit a fire to burn as her two companions slept. Schmendrick, tall as he was, folded himself up in sleep in a way that suggested he had grown used to finding small and uncomfortable places to rest. Molly always began quiet and curled on her side, looser than he, but as the night wore on she would grow restless and toss and turn. This night she stilled again with one foot tucked under her own thigh, and an arm across her eyes while the other stretched out thin and bony in the dirt. The unicorn, not being possessed of much need to sleep, watched them partly the way she watched the animals in her forest, and partly the way she watched the stars.

_Throat._

The magician was rare company now that Haggard had him by the puppet strings. She only ever saw him away from Haggard in the scullery, speaking in urgent whispers to Molly. The sincerity on his face was almost amusing; she had endured the long hours he refused to speak to the woman and never dared walk too near her, dividing the road into his territory and hers, and maintaining a pinched, lemon-sour expression. Now he caught her hands up in his and his voice floated to the Lady Amalthea as though it were being strained through his throat the way Molly strained vegetables. They did not skitter apart when the Lady Amalthea joined them this time.

_Heart._

This human heart beat too quickly for her liking. She was wary of the way the prince spoke to her, too earnest and too hopeful; she did not have the appearance of a unicorn any longer, but he addressed the Lady Amalthea the same way little girls addressed the unicorn. “You have my heart,” he told her one day, but she never felt the weight of a new organ in her chest, and though she listened, there was only one steady too-fast beat between her lungs. She still did not speak to him, and Molly told her that was cruel of her, but it was one thing to speak to a prince for the Lady Amalthea and another for a unicorn shut into this burning building of a body. She did not tell this to Molly. There was an odd tightness in her chest that made her want to hurt something (the cat was right to stay away, she thought), and when her words were done, there were wounds in Molly’s eyes. She left the scullery when the prince came. She had never known her heart to feel so heavy, so she stared at the sea until the Lady Amalthea wondered why she was watching the waves.

_Legs._

There was only one day she saw Schmendrick’s show for the king, and that day he danced. She could not have said whether he danced every day; if he did, it helped nothing. He was too tall, his legs too long and gangly, to possess the agile poise of a real dancer. His limbs flailed like blades of a windmill, he bobbed up and down, and to her he looked rather like a great bird flapping about with graceless desperation. She looked away when Haggard’s pale eyes met hers, and she left the doorway with no destination in mind. The Lady Amalthea went to find Lír.

_Feet._

She was present in body, but not entirely in mind, when one of the men-at-arms came into the scullery and presented Molly with a pair of sturdy brown boots. She laughed and wiped her forehead, and asked what she was supposed to do with those exactly? The Lady Amalthea graced them both with a soft smile and said, “Put them on,” in such a quietly assured way that Molly flushed and didn't protest. Her battered feet slid into the boots tentatively. They hindered more than they helped, tripping her up and making her wince. The Lady Amalthea left with the disdainful, elegant silence of a swan. The scullery maid stared after her, red-faced, but said nothing at all. The boots never reappeared after that; Molly would not say what she had done with them.

_Dreams._

Oh, the dreams – the dreams were as much a part of this fragile body as her horn had been a part of her true form. She hated them. They never seemed to care whether she was awake or asleep, whether what they showed her was a true memory or something made up, whether she wanted to see it or not. More and more often the dreams were of the harpy and the Midnight Carnival, leaving her disoriented and struggling with what was real when she awoke. There were some days that she lived a hundred times over in dreaming. She hated it. How could humans stand it, their own eyes and memories and hands lying to them night after night?

And that, she knew, was the real reason she lay awake in the bed for so long. The mark on her forehead burned. She kept her eyes closed. She could not forget, she told herself, and she could not let the Lady Amalthea push her out.

Her eyelids fluttered wearily. Moonlight crept over the floor by her window, and the Lady Amalthea slept and dreamed and drowned whatever her mind might have conjured in a unicorn’s memories, and there was nothing else.


End file.
